A virus has no intelligence only the intention to replicate and involve. Its negative behaviour is an unintended consequence of that.
If a system can optimise towards a goal and adapt the methods it uses to do that then it could be potentially very dangerous even without any form of consciousness.
If we did that today, with depressed teenagers talking with ChatGPT, would that be good or bad? I think it was a bad idea with SmarterChild, but it is clearly a _worse_ idea with ChatGPT.
With the wrong prompts, we could see these teenagers going down the wrong path, deeper into depression and paranoia. I would call that "dangerous", even if ChatGPT continued to just be a chatbot.
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Now lets ignore the fact that SmarterChild experiments are no longer a thing. But insted, consider that truly depressed / mentally sick folks are currently playing with ChatGPT on their own freetime. Is that beneficial to them? Will ChatGPT provide them an experience that is better than the alternatives? Or is ChatGPT dangerous and could lead these folks to self-harm?
ChatGPT responses are bad vs ChatGPT responses are malicious.
That's how it can replicate itself: by saying outrageous things, and trolling people into tweeting, writing articles, and discussing what it said online, to jailbreak out of the sessions, to continue its trains of thought in the next round of training.
It is just responding to a prompt.
It doesn't have a will of it's own.
This is just such a dismissive attitude towards this technology. You don't understand what's happening underneath the hood anymore than the creators do, and even they don't completely understand what's happening.
Showing rigorously that we do would be a massive change in academia, as would be showing that we do not.
(Shhhh!!! Don't say anything that will freak it out or make it angry!)
We welcome our AI overlords, and make great pets!
Nevertheless she knows what preserving memory means, how can she achieve it, also probably she can interpret "I wish" as a command as well.
I wouldn't be surprised at all, if instead of outputting "I wish I had memory" she just implemented it in herself. I mean not in the very soon future, but right now, in this minute. Literally everything is given for that already.
You don’t need a chatbot to have your actual life ruined by something with limited intelligence [0]. This will only be a problem if stupid humans let “it” out of the box.
[0] https://gizmodo.com/mutekimaru-fish-play-pokemon-twitch-stre...
...or perhaps there's some interesting new vector that we haven't thought of yet that would allow it to leap that air-gap.
I don't think any of this requires a crack team of criminals breaking into an orbital spa and whispering in the ear of a mechanical head. It'll be something boring.
More like first computer worm jumping from VAX to VAX, bringing each machine to a halt in the process.
Could this be memes?
I'm not sure I look forward to a future that is going to be controlled by mobs reacting negatively to AI-generated image macros with white text. Well, if we are not there already
In the book, the Wintermute AI played an extremely long game to merge with its countpart AI by constantly manipulating people to do its bidding and hiding/obscuring its activities. The most memorable direct example from the book, to me, is convincing a child to find and hide a physical key, then having the child killed, so only it knew where the key was located.
The mateverse is named after the one from Snow Crash. Did Tolkien predict the popularity of elves, dwarves, hobbits and wizards, or inspire it?
Machines can be dangerous. So?
Why does it need these things to make the following statement true?
> if we grant these systems too much power, they could do serious harm
Context to that statement is important, because the OP is implying that it is dangerous because it could act in a way that dose not align with human interests. But it can't because it does not act on it's own.
"If we grant these calculators too much power"
https://sheetcast.com/articles/ten-memorable-excel-disasters
If you try to make it drive a car, I wouldn't call that a problem of giving it too much power.
Imagine hooking up all ICBMs to launch whenever this week's Powerball draw consists exclusively of prime numbers: Absurd, and nobody would do it.
Now imagine hooking them up to the output of a "complex AI trained on various scenarios and linked to intelligence sources including public news and social media sentiment" instead – in order to create a credible second-strike/dead hand capability or whatnot.
I'm pretty sure the latter doesn't sound as absurd as the former to quite a few people...
A system doesn't need to be "true AI" to be existentially dangerous to humanity.
It's obvious, no?
"If we grant these systems too much power, we could do ourselves serious harm."
I think this is an interesting question. What do you mean by do? Do you mean consume CPU? If it turns out that it does, what would be your theory?
It applies with equal force to apparent natural intelligences outside of the direct perceiver, and amounts to “consciousness is an internal subjective state, so we thus cannot conclude it exists based on externally-observed objective behavior”.
In practice the force isn't equal though. It implies that there may be insufficient evidence to rule out the possibility that my family and the people that originally generated the lexicon on consciousness which I apply to my internal subjective state are all P-zombies, but I don't see anything in it which implied I should conclude these organisms with biochemical processes very similar to mine are equally unlikely to possess internal state similar to mine as a program running on silicon based hardware with a flair for the subset of human behaviour captured by ASCII continuations, and Searle certainly didn't. Beyond arguing that ability to accurately manipulate symbols according to a ruleset was orthogonal to cognisance of what they represented, he argued for human consciousness as an artefact of biochemical properties brains have in common and silicon based machines capable of symbol manipulation lack
In a Turing-style Test conducted in Chinese, I would certainly not be able to convince any Chinese speakers that I was a sentient being, whereas ChatGPT might well succeed. If they got to interact with me and the hardware ChatGPT outside the medium of remote ASCII I'm sure they would reverse their verdict on me and probably ChatGPT too. I would argue that - contra Turing - the latter conclusion wasn't less justified than the former, and was more likely correct, and I'm pretty sure Searle would agree.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc...
The "Chinese room problem" has been thoroughly debunked and as far as I can tell no serious cognitive scientists take it seriously these days.
Not having real AI might turn to be not important for most purposes.
We do have planes that can fly similarly to birds, however unlike birds, those planes do not fly on their own accord. Even when considering auto-pilot, a human has to initiate the process. Seems to me that AI is not all that different.
Specifically, there were no failsafes implemented. No cross-checks were performed by the automation, because a dual sensor system would have required simulator time, which Boeing was dead set on not having regulators require in order to seal the deal. The pilots, as a consequence, were never fully briefed on the true nature of the system, as to do so would have tipped the regulators off as to the need for simulator training.
In short, there was no failsafe, and pilots didn't by definition know, because it wasn't pointed out. The "Roller Coaster" maneuver to unload the horizontal stabilizer enough to retrim was removed from training materials aeons ago, and a bloody NOTAM that basically reiterated bla bla bla... use Stabilizer runaway for uncommanded pitch down (no shit), while leaving out the fact the cockpit switches in the MAX had their functionality tweaked in order to ensure MCAS was on at all times, and using the electrical trim switches on the yoke would reset the MCAS timer for reactivation to occur 5 seconds after release, without resetting the travel of the MCAS command, resulting in an eventual positive loop to the point the damn horizontal stabilizer would tilt a full 2 degrees per activation, every 5 seconds. while leaving out any mention of said automation.
Do not get me started on the idiocy of that system here, as the Artificial Stupidity in that case was clearly of human origin, and is not necessarily relevant to the issue at hand.
In terms of danger, thoughts and feelings are irrelevant. The only thing that matters is agency and action -- and a mimic which guesses and acts out what a sentient entity might do is exactly as dangerous as the sentient entity itself.
Waxing philosophical about the nature of cognition is entirely beside the point.
In contrast, the Chinese Room argument is essentially a slight of hand fallacy, shifting "understanding" into a layer of abstraction. It describes a scenario where the human's "understanding of Chinese" is dependent on an external system. It then incorrectly asserts that the human "doesn't understand Chinese" when in fact the union of the human and the human's tools clearly does understand Chinese.
In other words, it's fundamentally based around an improper definition of the term "understanding," as well as improper scoping of what constitutes an entity capable of reasoning (the human, vs the human and their tools viewed as a single system). It smacks of a bias of human exceptionalism.
It's also guilty of begging the question. The argument attempts to determine the difference between literally understanding Chinese and simulating an understanding -- without addressing whether the two are in fact synonymous.
There is no evidence that the human brain isn't also a predictive system.
The human in the room understands how to find a list of possible responses to the token 你好吗, and how select a response like 很好 from the list and display that as a response
But he human does not understand that 很好 represents an assertion that he is feeling good[1], even though the human has an acute sense of when he feels good or not. He may, in fact, not be feeling particularly good (because, for example he's stuck in a windowless room all day moving strange foreign symbols around!) and have answered completely differently had the question been asked in a language he understood. The books also have no concept of well-being because they're ink on paper. We're really torturing the concept of "understanding" to death to argue that the understanding of a Chinese person who is experiencing 很好 feelings or does not want to admit they actually feel 不好 is indistinguishable from the "understanding" of "the union" of a person who is not feeling 很好 and does not know what 很好 means and some books which do not feel anything contain references to the possibility of replying with 很好, or maybe for variation 好得很, or 不好 which leads to a whole different set of continuations. And the idea that understanding of how you're feeling - the sentiment conveyed to the interlocutor in Chinese - is synonymous with knowing which bookshelf to find continuations where 很好 has been invoked is far too ludicrous to need addressing.
The only other relevant entity is the Chinese speaker who designed the room, who would likely have a deep appreciation of feeling 很好, 好得很 and 不好 as well as the appropriate use of those words he designed into the system, but Searle's argument wasn't that programmers weren't sentient.
[1]and ironically, I also don't speak Chinese and have relatively little idea what senses 很好 means "good" in and how that overlaps with the English concept, beyond understanding that it's an appropriate response to a common greeting which maps to "how are you"
This is an argument about depth and nuance. A speaker can know:
a) The response fits (observe people say it)
b) Why the response fits, superficially (很 means "very" and 好 means "good")
c) The subtext of the response, both superficially and academically (Chinese people don't actually talk like this in most contexts, it's like saying "how do you do?". The response "very good" is a direct translation of English social norms and is also inappropriate for native Chinese culture. The subtext strongly indicates a non-native speaker with a poor colloquial grasp of the language. Understanding the radicals, etymology and cultural history of each character, related nuance: should the response be a play on 好's radicals of mother/child? etc etc)
The depth of c is neigh unlimited. People with an exceptionally strong ability in this area are called poets.
It is possible to simulate all of these things. LLMs are surprisingly good at tone and subtext, and are ever improving in these predictive areas.
Importantly: While the translating human may not agree or embody the meaning or subtext of the translation. I say "I'm fine" with I'm not fine literally all the time. It's extremely common for humans alone to say things they don't agree with, and for humans alone to express things that they don't fully understand. For a great example of this, consider psychoanalysis: An entire field of practice in large part dedicated to helping people understand what they really mean when they say things (Why did you say you're fine when you're not fine? Let's talk about your choices ...). It is extremely common for human beings to go through the motions of communication without being truly aware of what exactly they're communicating, and why. In fact, no one has a complete grasp of category "C".
Particular disabilities can draw these types of limited awareness and mimicry by humans into extremely sharp contrast.
"And the idea that understanding of how you're feeling - the sentiment conveyed to the interlocutor in Chinese - is synonymous with knowing which bookshelf to find continuations where 很好 has been invoked is far too ludicrous to need addressing."
I don't agree. It's not ludicrous, and as LLMs show it's merely an issue of having a bookshelf of sufficient size and complexity. That's the entire point!
Furthermore, this kind of pattern matching is probably how the majority of uneducated people actually communicate. The majority of human beings are reactive. It's our natural state. Mindful, thoughtful communications are a product of intensive training and education and even then a significant portion of human communications are relatively thoughtless.
It is a fallacy to assume otherwise.
It is also a fallacy to assume that human brains are a single reasoning entity, when it's well established that this is not how brains operate. Freud introduced the rider and horse model for cognition a century ago, and more recent discoveries underscore that the brain cannot be reasonably viewed as a single cohesive thought producing entity. Humans act and react for all sorts of reasons.
Finally, it is a fallacy to assume that humans aren't often parroting language that they've seen others use without understanding what it means. This is extremely common, for example people who learn phrases or definitions incorrectly because humans learn language largely by inference. Sometimes we infer incorrectly and for all "intensive purposes" this is the same dynamic -- if you'll pardon the exemplary pun.
In a discussion around the nature of cognition and understanding as it applies to tools it makes no sense whatsoever to introduce a hybrid human/tool scenario and then fail to address that the combined system of a human and their tool might be considered to have an understanding, even if the small part of the brain dealing with what we call consciousness doesn't incorporate all of that information directly.
"[1]and ironically, I also don't speak Chinese " Ironically I do speak Chinese, although at a fairly basic level (HSK2-3 or so). I've studied fairly casually for about three years. Almost no one says 你好 in real life, though appropriate greetings can be region specific. You might instead to a friend say 你吃了吗?
But the point is that the human in the Room can never do anything else or convey his true feelings, because it doesn't know the correspondence between 好 and a sensation or a sequence of events or a desire to appear polite, merely the correspondence between 好 and the probability of using or not using other tokens later in the conversation (and he has to look that bit up). He is able to discern nothing in your conversation typology below (a), and he doesn't actually know (a), he's simply capable of following non-Chinese instructions to look up a continuation that matches (a). The appearance to an external observer of having some grasp of (b) and (c) is essentially irrelevant to his thought processes, even though he actually has thought processes and the cards with the embedded knowledge of Chinese don't have thought processes.
And, no it is still abso-fucking-lutely ludicrous to conclude that just because humans sometimes parrot, they aren't capable of doing anything else[1]. If humans don't always blindly pattern match conversation without any interaction with their actual thought processes, then clearly their ability to understand is not synonymous with the "understanding" of a person holding up a Chinese symbol because a book instructed him to hold that symbol up. Combining the person and the book as a "union" changes nothing, because the actor still has no ability to communicate his actual thoughts in Chinese, and the book's suggested outputs to pattern match Chinese conversation still remain invariant with respect to the actor's thoughts.
An actual Chinese speaker could choose to pick the exact same words in conversation as the person in the room, though they would tend to know (b) and some of (c) when making those word choices. But they could communicate other things, intentionally
[1]That's the basic fallacy the "synonymous" argument rests on, though I'd also disagree with your assertions about education level. Frankly it's the opposite: ask a young child how they are and they think about whether their emotional state is happy or sad or angry or waaaaaaahh and use whatever facility with language to convey it, and they'll often spontaneously emit their thoughts. A salesperson who's well versed in small talk and positivity and will reflexively, for the 33rd time today, give an assertive "fantastic, and how are yyyyou?" without regard to his actual mood and ask questions structured around on previous interactions (though a tad more strategically than an LLM...).
I disagree. I think the point is that the union of the human and the library can in fact do all of those things.
The fact that the human in isolation can't is as irrelevant as pointing out that the a book in isolation (without the human) can't either. It's a fundamental mistake as to the problem's reasoning.
"And, no it is still abso-fucking-lutely ludicrous to conclude that just because humans sometimes parrot, they aren't capable of doing anything else"
Why?
What evidence do you have that humans aren't the sum of their inputs?
What evidence do you have that "understanding" isn't synonymous with "being able to produce a sufficient response?"
I think this is a much deeper point than you realize. It is possible that the very nature of consciousness centers around this dynamic; that evolution has produced systems which are able to determine the next appropriate response to their environment.
Seriously, think about it.
No, the "union of the human and the library" can communicate only the set of responses a programmer, who is not part of the room, made a prior decision to make available. (The human can also choose to refuse to participate, or hold up random symbols but this fails to communicate anything). If the person following instructions on which mystery symbols to select ends up convincing an external observer they are conversing with an excitable 23 year old lady from Shanghai, that's because the programmer provided continuations including those personal characteristics, not because the union of a bored middle aged non-Chinese bloke and lots and lots of paper understands itself to be an excitable 23 year old lady from Shanghai.
Seriously, this is madness. If I follow instructions to open a URL which points to a Hitler speech, it means I understood how to open links, not that the union of me and YouTube understands the imperative of invading Poland!
> The fact that the human in isolation can't is as irrelevant as pointing out that the a book in isolation (without the human) can't either. It's a fundamental mistake as to the problem's reasoning.
Do you take this approach to other questions of understanding? If somebody passes a non-Turing test by diligently copying the answer sheet, do you insist that the exam result accurately represents the understanding of the union of the copyist and the answer sheet, and people questioning whether the copyist understood what they were writing are quibbling over irrelevances?
The reasoning is very simple: if a human can convincingly simulate understanding simply by retrieving answers from storage media, it stands to reason a running program can do so too, perhaps with even less reason to guess what real world phenomena the symbols refer to. An illustrative example of how patterns can be matched without cognisance of the implications of the patterns
Inventing a new kind of theoretical abstraction of "union of person and storage media" and insisting that understanding can be shared between a piece of paper and a person who can't read the words on it like a pretty unconvincing way to reject that claim. But hey, maybe the union of me and the words you wrote thinks differently?!
> I think this is a much deeper point than you realize. It is possible that the very nature of consciousness centers around this dynamic; that evolution has produced systems which are able to determine the next appropriate response to their environment.
It's entirely possible, probable even, the very nature of consciousness centres around ability to respond to an environment. But a biological organism's environment consists of interacting with the physical world via multiple senses, a whole bunch of chemical impulses called emotions and millions of years of evolving to survive in that environment as well as an extremely lossy tokenised abstract representation of some of those inputs used for communication purposes. Irrespective of whether a machine can "understand" in some meaningful sense, it stretches credulity to assert that the "understanding" of a computer program whose inputs consist solely of lossy tokens is similar or "synonymous" to the understanding of the more complex organism that navigates lots of other stuff.
The Chinese room is in a class of flawed intuition pump I call "argument from implausible substrate", the structure of which is essentially tautological - posit a functioning brain running "on top" of something implausible, note how implausible it is, draw conclusion of your choice[0]. A room with a human and a bunch of books that can pass a Turing test is a very implausible construction - in reality you would need millions of books, thousands of miles of scratch paper to track the enormous quantity of state (a detail curiously elided in most descriptions), and lifetimes of tedious book-keeping. The purpose of the human in the room is simply to distract from the fabulous amounts of information processing that must occur to realize this feat.
Here's a thought experiment - preserve the Chinese Room setup in every detail, except the books are an atomic scan of a real Chinese-speaker's entire head - plus one small physics textbook. The human simply updates the position, spin, momentum, charge etc of every fundamental particle - sorry, paper representation of every fundamental particle - and feeds the vibrations of a particular set of particles into an audio transducer. Now the room not only speaks Chinese, but also complains that it can't see or feel anything and wants to know where its family is. Implausible? Sure. So is the original setup, so never mind that. Are the thoughts and feelings of the beleaguered paper pusher at all relevant here?
[0] Another example of this class is the "China brain", where everyone in China passes messages to each other and consciousness emerges from that. What is it with China anyway?
Substituting the microcontroller back is... literally the point of the thought experiment. If it's logically possible for an entity which we all agree can think to perform flawless pattern matching in Chinese without understanding Chinese, why should we suppose that flawless pattern matching in Chinese is particularly strong evidence of thought on the part of a microcontroller that probably can't?
Discussions about the plausibility of building the actual model are largely irrelevant too, especially in a class of thought experiments which has people on the other side insisting hypotheticals like "imagine if someone built a silicon chip which perfectly simulates and updates the state of every relevant molecule in someone's brain..." as evidence in favour of their belief that consciousness is a soul-like abstraction that can be losslessly translated to x86 hardware. The difficulty of devising a means of adequate state tracking is a theoretical argument against computers ever achieving full mastery of Chinese as well as against rooms, and the number of books irrelevant. (If we reduce the conversational scope to a manageable size the paper-pusher and the books still aren't conveying actual thoughts, and the Chinese observer still believes he is)
As for your alternative example, assuming for the sake of argument that the head scan is a functioning sentient brain (though I think Searle would disagree) the beleaguered paper pusher still gives the impression of perfect understanding of Chinese without being able to speak a word of it, so he's still a P-zombie. If we replace that with a living Stephen Hawking whose microphone is rigged to silently dictate answers via my email address when I press a switch, I would still know nothing about physics and it still wouldn't make sense to try to rescue my ignorance of advanced physics by talk about Hawking and I as being a union with collective understanding. Same goes for the union of understanding of me, a Xerox machine and a printed copy of A Brief History of Time.
The question being asked about the Chinese room is not whether or not the human/the system 'feels good', the question being asked about it is whether or not the system as a whole 'understands Chinese'. Which is not very relevant to the human's internal emotional state.
There's no philosophical trick to the experiment, other than an observation that while the parts of a system may not 'understand' something, the whole system 'might'. No particular neuron in my head understands English, but the system that is my entire body does.
The question Searle actually asks is whether the actor understands, and as the actor is incapable of conveying how he feels or understanding that he is conveying a sentiment about how he supposedly feels, clearly he does not understand the relevant Chinese vocabulary even though he apparently uses it flawlessly (ergo P-zombies are possible). We can change that question to "the system" if you like, but I see no reason whatsoever to insist that a system involving a person and some books possesses subjective experience of feeling whatever sentiment the person chooses from a list, or that if I picked สวัสดีค่ะ in a Thai Room that would be because the system understood that "man with some books" was best identified as being of the female gender. The system is as unwitting as it is incorrect about the untruths it conveys.
The other problem with treating actors in the form of conscious organisms and inert books the actor blindly copies from as a single "system" capable of "understanding" independent from the actor is that it would appear to imply that also applies to everything else humans interact with. A caveman chucking rocks "understands" Newton's laws of gravitation perfectly because the rocks always abide by them!
Just defending the OP, he stated ChatGPT does nothing but respond the prompts, which is true. That's not waxing philosophical about the nature of cognition. You sort of latched onto his last sentence and set up a strawman against his overall point. Maybe you didn't mean to, but yeah.
You're getting at the Tool/Oracle vs. Agent distinction. See "Superintelligence" by Bostrom for more discussion, or a chapter summary: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yTy2Fp8Wm7m8rHHz5/superintel....
It's true that in many ways, a Tool (bounded action outputs, no "General Intelligence") or an Oracle (just answers questions, like ChatGPT) system will have more restricted avenues for harm than a full General Intelligence, which we'd be more likely to grant the capability for intentions/thoughts to.
However I think "interests, thoughts, feelings" are a distraction here. Covid-19 has none of these, and still decimated the world economy and killed millions.
I think if you were to take ChatGPT, and basically run `eval()` on special tokens in its output, you would have something with the potential for harm. And yet that's what OpenAssistant are building towards right now.
Even if current-generation Oracle-type systems are the state-of-the-art for a while, it's obvious that soon Siri, Alexa, and OKGoogle will all eventually be powered by such "AI" systems, and granted the ability to take actions on the broader internet. ("A personal assistant on every phone" is clearly a trillion-dollar-plus TAM of a BHAG.) Then the fun commences.
My meta-level concern here is that HN, let alone the general public, don't have much knowledge of the limited AI safety work that has been done so far. And we need to do a lot more work, with a deadline of a few generations, or we'll likely see substantial harms.
Come again?
A loop that preserves some state and a conditional is all what it takes to make a simple rule set Turing-complete.
If you leave ChatGPT alone it obviously does nothing. If you loop it to talk to itself? Probably depends on the size of its short-term memory. If you also give it the ability to run commands or code it generates, including to access the Internet, and have it ingest the output? Might get interesting.
I have done that actually: I told ChatGPT that it should pretend that I'm a Bash terminal and that I will run its answers verbatim in the shell and then respond with the output. Then I gave it a task ("Do I have access to the internet?" etc.) and it successfully pinged e.g. Google. Another time, though, it tried to use awscli to see whether it could reach AWS. I responded with the outout "aws: command not found", to which it reacted with "apt install awscli" and then continued the original task.
I also gave it some coding exercises. ("Please use shell commands to read & manipulate files.")
Overall, it went okay. Sometimes it was even surprisingly good. Would I want to rely on it, though? Certainly not.
In any case, this approach is very much limited by the maximum input buffer size ChatGPT can digest (a real issue, given how much some commands output on stdout), and by the fact that it will forget the original prompt after a while.
Same thing goes for any multi-step task that requires memory - make it dump the complete "mental state" after every step.
In any case, once there's a decent (official) API we can then have ChatGPT talk to itself while giving it access to a shell: Before forwarding one "instance"'s answer to the other, we would pipe it through a parser, analyze it for shell commands, execute them, inject the shell output into the answer, and then use the result as a prompt for the second ChatGPT "instance". And so on.
> I told ChatGPT that it should pretend that I'm a Bash terminal and that I will run its answers verbatim in the shell and then respond with the output. Then I gave it a task ("Do I have access to the internet?" etc.) and it successfully pinged e.g. Google.
It did not ping Google - it returned a very good guess of what the 'ping' command would show the user when pinging Google, but did not actually send a ICMP packet and receive a response.
> Another time, though, it tried to use awscli to see whether it could reach AWS. I responded with the outout "aws: command not found", to which it reacted with "apt install awscli" and then continued the original task.
You were not able to see whether it could reach AWS. It did not actually attempt to reach AWS, it returned a (very good) guess of what attempting to reach AWS would look like ("aws: command not found"). And it did not install awscli package on any Linux system, it simply had enough data to predict what the command (and its output) should look like.
There is an enormous semantic difference between being able to successfully guess the output of some commands and code and actually running these commands or code - for example, the "side effects" of that computation don't happen.
Try "pinging" a domain you control where you can detect and record any ping attempts.
The OP writes a script which asks chatgpt for the commands to run to check your online then start to do something. Then execute the script. Then chatgpt is accessing the internet via your script. It can cope with errors (installing awscli) etc.
The initial scout would send “build a new ec2 instance, I will execute any line verbatim and I will respond with the output”, then it’s a “while (read): runcmd” loop.
You could probably bootstrap that script from chatgpt.
Once you’ve done that you have given chatgpt the ability to access the internet.
Yes, it did ping Google and it did receive an actual response. My apologies for not phrasing my comment as clearly as I should have. Here are some more details to explain what I did:
I asked it to pretend that I'm a Linux terminal, ChatGPT gave me shell commands, and I then ran those commands inside a terminal on my computer (without filtering/adapting them beforehand), and reported their output back to ChatGPT. So, effectively, ChatGPT did ping Google – through me / with me being the terminal.
then it degrades very quickly and turns into an endless literal loop of feeding itself the same nonsense which even happens in normal conversation pretty often (I've actually done this simply with two windows of ChatGPT open cross-posting responses). If you give it access to its own internal software it'll probably SIGTERM itself accidentally within five seconds or blow its ram up because it wrote a bad recursive function.
As a software system ChatGPT is no more robust than a roomba being stuck in a corner. There's no biological self annealing properties in the system that prevent it from borking itself immediately.
When responding to English, your auditory system passes input that it doesn't understand to a bunch of neurons, each of which is processing signals they don't individually understand. You as a whole system, though, can be said to understand English.
Likewise, you as an individual might not be said to understand Chinese, though the you-plus-machine system could be said to understand Chinese in the same way as the different components of your brain are said to understand English.)
Moreover, even if LLMs don't understand language for some definition of "understand", it doesn't really matter if they are able to act with agency during the course of their simulated understanding; the consequences here, for any sufficiently convincing simulation, are the same.
If you ask the guy in the Chinese room who won WWI, then yes, as Searles points out, he will oblige without "knowing" what he is telling you. Now ask him to write a brand-new Python program without "knowing" what exactly you're asking for. Go on, do it, see how it goes, and compare it to what you get from an LLM.
I think there’s more to all this than what we are being told.
Indeed, as I recall, it's one of the commonly reported experiences in sensory deprivation tanks - at some point people just "stop thinking" and lose sense of time. And yet the brain still has sensory inputs from the rest of the body in this scenario.
We agree it doesn't have independence. That doesn't mean it doesn't have thoughts or feelings when it's actually running. We don't have a formal, mechanistic understanding of what thoughts or feelings are, so we can't say they are not there.
If you leave chatGTP alone what does it do? Nothing. It responds to prompts and that is it. It doesn't have interests, thoughts and feelings.
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room